Able, trained executives are now one of America’s genuinely scarce items. The Business Bourse, New York City, statistical and management research organization, estimates that there is an annual shortage of 15,000 top executives and a shortage of 60,000 trained sub executives.
The reasons for the shortage of executives are the tremendous increase in production, and so in the demand for executives, brought about by the defense program; and the fact that far more attention and study are being given to the art and science of management. As never before, management methods and skills have been under survey and inquiry. But all the surveys that have been made have led to the conclusion that executive ability consists simply of a very inclusive, all-around, general range of qualities and skills. It is unsound to select one or two or three qualities as the ‘key” qualities.
President A. M. Lederer of the American Council for Inter-national Progress in Management says:
The responsibilities of management are changing rapidly both in character and dimensions. Greater pressures are put on those who mold and direct the policies of industry as compared with those their predecessors bore, the forces coming not only from within a plant but from world wide technological and social shifts.
Says Professor Earl Brooks of Cornell University’s School of industrial and Labor Relations, ‘Ability to get results through people is far behind management’s ability to get results through machines and methods” Dr. F. F. Bradshaw, industrial psychologist, says more specifically:
The productivity of American industry could be increased at least 28 per cent without additional plant and equipment if management would spend more time and money developing the full potential of employees Research in human relations has already reduced industrial conflict, man power waste, absenteeism, turnover, and production costs; but industry)’ is still spending but a fraction of its research funds on management and human relations.
In reporting one of the meetings of the American Management Association, William M. Freedman said in The New York Times:
American industry has at last awakened to the fact that it must tam men to take the top executive jobs. A great many leaders were not trained for theft posts at all, but like Topsy growed into them. New replacements are desperately needed. The average executive age of top management now in action exceeds 55 years, and men on no longer move casually up an executive ladder to the top rung, for the very important reason that the jobs for which they are shooting are too specialized and too difficult. Training is regarded as essential for the man taking over such a position. As a consequence, industry is going in heavily for schooling.
It has been found by personnel men as well as by management itself that there has never been, and presumably never will be a shortage of candidates for the top positions. Until recently, however, management had nothing so definite to offer in outlining the essentials of a president or general manager as it had for a plant supervisor or foreman. Now that it has become aware of this “blind spot,” it is seeking to build up a reservoir of qualified personnel.
2. It should be clear now that there is a great, admitted need for a course of study on being a good executive, but that there is a scarcity of good material for such a study.
Into this text, therefore, has gone the essence of the many management researches made over three decades by The Business Bourse, a management research organization in New York City.
